The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Mary-Frances O’Connor, a renowned grief expert and neuroscientist, shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, providing a new paradigm for understanding love, loss, and learning. Based on O’Connor’s own trailblazing neuroimaging work, research in the field, and her real-life stories, The Grieving Brain does what the best popular science books do, combining storytelling, accessible science, and practical knowledge that will help us better understand what happens when we grieve and how to navigate loss with more ease and grace. https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/books/the-grieving-brain
Living on The Seabed: A memoir of love, life and survival by Lindsay Nicholson
This book was recommended to us by one of our Walthamstow Grief Cafe attendees. Living on a Seabed is a deeply moving memoir in which journalist Lindsay Nicholson reflects on the deaths of her husband and young daughter within the same year. Through honest, unembellished writing, Nicholson explores the disorienting landscape of grief—its numbness, its unpredictability, and the slow, uneven process of adapting to life after profound loss. The book gently shows how grief reshapes a life but also how meaning, connection, and hope can re-emerge over time.
With the End in Mind by Kathryn Mannix
In With the End in Mind, Dr Kathryn Mannix shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying as a Palliative Care Consultant, and makes a case for the therapeutic power of approaching death not with trepidation, but with openness, clarity, and understanding. https://www.kathrynmannix.com/books/with-the-end-in-mind/